Changelog and Feature Plan Generator

This is kind of a new service announcement for our various maintainers and developers of KDE software. As I don’t like manual work and especially not manual and repetitive work, I decided to implement a tool which generates the markup for our changelog, which can be found in my scratch repo.

The changelog is generated from all bugs with a given version in the fixed-in field. So remember to add
BUG: 1234567889
FIXED-IN: 4.8.3

to each of your commits to the stable branch (please also add good keywords to your commits in master). This allows your maintainer to generate the changelog for your product in less than a minute. The bug’s summary is used as the changelog entry. So this is also a good reason to give a proper summary to your bug reports and remove junk like “KWin fails” Oh and if you don’t know the bug report to your commit, just perform a search (bugs.kde.org is really fast nowadays – so it’s no excuse!) and if there is really no bug report rethink whether your commit is a good idea for the stable branch at all.

I hope that this tool will help us to get a better changelog in 4.8.3, so please all help to make that happen. If I see good progress, I will invest the time to get the tool into a shape that our release team can generate the complete changelog for a release without any manual intervention.

Generating the changelog is not the only manual process I don’t like, also creating and updating the feature plan is an annoying process, especially as writing tables in MediaWiki markup is so much fun. If you use the bugtracker to manage the features you are going to add to the next release (have a look at target milestones) the tool can also be used to generate MediaWiki markup for the feature plan. Based on whether the bug is opened or closed a todo or done entry is generated. If the bug report is assigned to you the tool can fetch your mail address, but not yet your name (all KWin features are assigned to the default component).

4 thoughts on “Changelog and Feature Plan Generator”

Ah, great! I hated this manual maintaining of the changelog with passion and will try your tool for 4.8.3. Frank Reininghaus always needed to push me for updating the changelog for Dolphin and I think I’ll surprise him for 4.8.3 (of course Frank will only be surprised if he does not read this blog-entry ;-))

Martin, this is very nice indeed! Your tool will not only make the changelog generation easier for developers. I think that many users will greatly appreciate getting more complete changelogs in the future.